In a wireless communication system, content on a signaling plane, such as Identity (ID) of a cell, a broadcast signal, or paging information from a user, is often shared by users in a cell; and content on a data plane is often specified for a user. Therefore, in the wireless communication system, the demand for designing the signaling plane is different from the demand for designing the data plane.
A conventional second generation communication technology (2G) network is mainly for voice service in a continuously-covered large area, and therefore combination of the data plane and the signaling plane is used to further ensure voice continuity. For a third generation communication technology (3G) network and a future network, the demand for data transmission increases explosively, and the demand for voice service decreases, and therefore the conflicts in the tight coupling design for the data plane and the signaling plane becomes more and more outstanding. In a new network architecture, i.e., a Beyond Cellular Green (BCG) network, signaling-plane information and data-plane information are transmitted by different network devices respectively, and designs for the data plane network and for the signaling plane network are different, to maximize system capacity.
In the above-mentioned network architecture, the network switching is stilled performed according to the conventional switching method, that is, the bearer of the signaling-plane information and the bearer of the data-plane information are switched simultaneously.